THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:
Christians’ most beloved prayer occurs in Matthew 6:9-13 as part of Jesus’s “Sermon on the Mount,” perhaps the most memorable speech in human history. (What competitors can you think of?) The New Testament also contains a second, briefer version of the great prayer, in Luke 11:2-4 (on which more below). In Matthew, Jesus tells believers not to pile up many words in praying and offers a simple, concise example.
Here is the Matthew wording from the first New Testament published in English, William Tyndale’s 1526 translation: “O our father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Let thy kingdom come. Thy will be fulfilled, as well in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, even as we forgive them which trespass us. Lead us not in to temptation: but deliver us from evil, For thine is the kingdom and the power, and the glory for ever. Amen.”
The Holy Roman Empire executed the exiled Tyndale for heresy in 1536. But as seen in that quotation, his work lives on in much of the phrasing in the later and officially authorized King James Version, which remains in popular use 415 years after it was issued, alongside other editions based on it. The King James wording of the Lord’s Prayer remains ingrained in Protestant worship services and private devotions.
The Catholic omission
Which brings us to the third version. Catholics never say the final words (“for thine is the kingdom . . .”) during Mass or when reciting the “Our Father” in the Rosary, nor is this concluding doxology found in authorized Catholic Bibles. Why? Pope Damasus assigned his scholarly secretary, St. Jerome, to translate the Bible into Latin, known as the Vulgate version. For his rendition of the four Gospels (A.D. 383), Jerome questioned the authenticity of manuscripts with the final phrase and omitted it. Subsequent Catholic Bibles have maintained that tradition.
The consensus among today’s technical experts in the discipline known as “textual criticism” says he was right. There are few surviving texts of most ancient writings, but thousands of manuscripts and fragments of the New Testament. That requires study of history, ancient languages and handwriting styles to determine which texts and precise words most likely preserved what was originally written. (Most of the textual variations do not challenge basic Christian history or beliefs.)
In 1582, the pioneer English New Testament of Catholics’ Douay-Rheims Bible followed Jerome’s Latin minus the final phrase. In the same era, Protestant pioneer Tyndale and the King James team worked from the Textus Receptus (Latin meaning the “received” or commonly accepted text), which included the longer ending. They drew upon the first published New Testament in Greek (1516 with later revisions) by the Dutch Catholic Desiderius Erasmus, who consulted a variety of texts that were then available.
Protestant diehards
Conservative Protestant diehards in the “King James Only” movement believe churches should use only that version as the most authentic. A leading American textual critic, Bruce Metzger of Princeton Theological Seminary, wrote that reverence for the Textus Receptus and King James is “so superstitious” that criticisms of it “have been regarded as akin to sacrilege. Yet its textual basis is essentially a handful of late and haphazardly collected” Greek manuscripts, plus it contains a dozen passages with no basis in ancient manuscripts.
Modern Protestant English translations starting with the English Revised Version New Testament (1881) omit Matthew’s final phrase. The Southern Baptists’ Holman version puts the extra words into the text but within brackets, while more typically, modern Protestant-oriented Bibles omit the words in the text but add a footnote like this in the Revised Standard Version (1946): “Other authorities, some ancient, add, in some form, For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever. Amen.” Catholicism’s New American Bible has no footnote citing the option.
St. Jerome’s omission is substantiated by two important and separate parchment manuscripts of the nearly complete Bible. The existence of the 4th Century Codex Sinaiticus in an Orthodox monastery on the Sinai Peninsula was first reported in 1761, and scholarly access to the full text began in 1859. Codex Vaticanus, held in the Vatican Library, is attested as early as 1475 and experts date it around A.D. 300 – 325. The authenticity and dating of Vaticanus were confirmed by Papyrus 75, the earliest surviving copy of Luke and a portion of John, dated at A.D. 200 – 225. This precious manuscript, discovered in Egypt and published in 1961, was acquired by the Vatican in 2007.
“Early attestation”
Yet Australian exegete Leon Morris wrote that though the oldest manuscripts lack the longer ending it “has considerable early attestation,” actually in hundreds of texts. He thought “it is unlikely that a 1st Century Jewish prayer should conclude without a doxology and its absence in many manuscripts may be because it was simply assumed, while in others it was explicitly included.” Consider that the Didache, Christianity’s oldest surviving teaching manual written as early as A.D. 100, advocates three daily recitations of the prayer and concludes the prayer with “for thine is the power and the glory forever.”
As for Luke’s version, it runs only 42 English words in the New Revised Standard Version (2021 revision). I. Howard Marshall of the University of Aberdeen figured it’s unlikely that Luke would have purposely omitted words from Jesus in Matthew so Luke was the older of the two versions. Other authors think it’s plausible that Jesus taught these concepts many times and the two Gospels preserved separate traditions from particular occasions. And there are other theories.
Here are the differences, per the 2021 NRSV wording, starting with the contexts. Matthew offers Jesus’s direct teaching while in Luke he responds to a disciple’s request for guidance. Instead of “Our Father in heaven,” Luke begins simply “Father.” In the forgiveness section, Matthew’s word means literally “debts” while Luke has “sins” (and some churches use Tyndale’s “trespasses”). Luke omits two of Matthew’s phrases, “may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” and “rescue us from the evil one.” The Catholic New American Bible and evangelical New International Version also use “evil one,” referring to the personal Devil instead of “evil.” Fuller Theological Seminary’s Donald Hagner leans to “evil one” but says both translations are legitimate, and in any event to be free from either one is to be free from the other.
Theologians prefer “do not bring us to the time of trial” as in the NRSV instead of the familiar “lead us not into temptation.” Such a reference to life’s difficulties is an equally possible translation from the Greek. Note that James 1:13 teaches that no one should say “I am being tempted by God,” that is, lured to evil and sin. Finally, be aware there are other ancient variations beyond the big three.
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